Herbert Ross
The Turning Point (Due Vite Una Svolta)

"The Turning Point", the turning point, the one that follows a decision made after many thoughts or by following one's instinct. But also the "pirouette", a dance step. And it is precisely to ballet and everything that revolves around it that Herbert Ross dedicates his "The Turning Point" in '77. Former choreographer, already director of Allen's "Play It Again, Sam" in '72 and future director of "Nijinsky" and "Footloose".

With this film, Ross tries to bring the viewer inside a world that is always seen from afar in its harmony, perfection, and grace; in reality, it is a field where the struggle to emerge is a daily occurrence, where one toils, sweats, collapses, and sometimes does not get back up. It tells the story of two dancers from a New York company, one who has left dance for family (Shirley MacLaine), and the other who has sacrificed everything for success and must reckon with what remains of her life at the twilight of her career (Anne Bancroft). But there is also a gaze turned towards the newcomers, their passions, their lives.

An elegant film, with great group choreographies by the American Ballet Theatre company, but above all, a movie that sees two great actresses of cinema acting together; Bancroft and MacLaine engage in a series of very intense scenes, neither tends to overdo it and their dialogues full of emotion, eternally balancing between MacLaine's resentment and Bancroft's nostalgia, envy, are worth the film on their own. A film that was successful and was nominated for 11 Oscars, it didn't win any, a record. Perhaps too intellectual, too niche and not very commercial but an important film for the decade, certainly one of the key points of American cinema of those years, but today it is practically forgotten by Italian schedules. The role of Bancroft was supposed to go to Audrey Hepburn, but she, a former dancer, refused, she had practically closed with cinema. A pity she would have returned to act with MacLaine after "The Children's Hour" in '61, she probably would have given cinema another unforgettable figure, perhaps melancholic and sad like her splendid Marian in "Robin And Marian".